Piss poor parents better beware. Prosecutor Kym Worthy of Detroit has a new proposal she is putting to gether which will attempt to make parents be more accountable for their children’s behavior as well as make them have more interest in their child’s education. In this proposal parents would be jailed for up to three days for repeatedly missing scheduled parent-teacher conferences. The proposal is in response to 12 year old Demarco Harris shooting and killing a woman during a robbery in Detroit. When the police knocked on Harris’s parent’s door at 2 a.m., they had no idea where their 12 year old son was.

Worthy hopes that this stiff repercussion will force parents to be more involved in their children’s lives. I applaud this proposal. It is deeper than parent teacher conferences. It is the message parents send their kids when they allow them to run the streets and do not enforce any rules or accountability on their children. It is the message of disinterest they send their kids when they never show their face at any parent-teacher conference. They send the message to their children that they can do whatever they want and ultimately that they do not care.

I hope that this proposal passes and is implemented in all states because for some parents, the threat of them being arrested is the only thing that will make them want to do the right thing. The next proposal should be to jail parents whose children do not attend school and miss several days in one school year.

There are too many children who do not have anyone to answer to. They do not feel any fear of punishment from their actions from anyone, including their parents. This could be the tool necessary to promote parents to be more active in their child’s life. Even if they do not necessarily want to, feel like it, or have any interest at all. After all, one of a parent’s main goals should be to mold their children into a functional, responsible adult.

Worthy is still working on the details, but once her proposal is finished, she hopes to present it to county commissioners in August and persuade them to approve an ordinance. After that, she states that she may take it to state legislators in Lansing. Harris, who is now 13 was sentenced to a high security juvenile facility. Worthy states that she is trying to prevent their being more children who in Harris’ situation in the future.